That night the father died, though every effort was made to revive him and save his life.  Grenfell and his crew gave the man and woman as decent a Christian burial as the wilderness and conditions would permit, and when all was over the Doctor found five small children on his hands.

An uncle of the children lived upon the coast and this uncle volunteered to take one of them into his home.  The other four Doctor Grenfell carried south on the hospital ship.  There was no proper provision for their care at St. Anthony, his headquarters hospital, and he advertised in a New England paper for homes for them.  One response was received, and this from the wife of a New England farmer, offering to provide for two.  The Doctor sent two to the farm, the other two remaining at St. Anthony hospital.

The next child to come to him was a baby of three years.  The child’s father had died and the mother married a widower with a large family of his own.  He was a hard-hearted rascal, and the mother was a selfish woman with small love for her baby.  The man declined to permit her to take it into his home and she left it in a mud hut, a cellar-like place, with no other floor than the earth.  A kind-hearted woman, who lived near by, ran in now and again to see the baby and to take it scraps of food and give it some care.  She could not adopt it, for she and her husband were scarce able to feed the many mouths in their own family.

So alone this tiny little girl of three lived in the mud hut through the long days and the longer and darker nights.  There was no mother’s knee at which to kneel; no one to teach her to lisp her first prayer; no one to tuck her snugly into a little white bed; no one to kiss her before she slept.  O, how lonely she must have been!  Think of those chilly Labrador nights, when she huddled down on the floor in the ragged blanket that was her bed!  How many nights she must have cried herself to sleep with loneliness and fear!

Here, in the mud hut, Doctor Grenfell found her one day.  She was sitting on the earthen floor, talking to herself and playing with a bit of broken crockery, her only toy.  He gathered her into his big strong arms and I have no doubt that tears filled his eyes as he looked into her innocent little face and carried her down to his boat.

In a locker on his ship, the Strathcona, there were neat little clothes that thoughtful children in our own country had sent him to give to the destitute little ones of Labrador.  He turned the baby girl over to his big mate, who had babies of his own at home.  The mate stroked her tangled hair with a brawney hand, and talked baby talk to her, and as she snuggled close in his fatherly arms, he carried her below decks.  The baby’s mother would not have known her little daughter if, two hours later, she had gone aboard the Strathcona and heard the peals of laughter and seen the happy little thing, bathed, dressed in neat clean clothes, and well fed, playing on deck with a pretty doll that Doctor Grenfell had somewhere found.